


at my worst

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a softer animorphs [2]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Book 4: The Message, F/M, I think this may be the fluffiest thing I've written to date, Jake Berenson Defense Squad, Jake is stressed okay and having a brand new Andalite to hide probably made him even more stressed, the author also has a lot of feelings about Cassie but those are less of a focus here, the author has a lot of feelings about Jake Berenson and very little in the way of self-control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: At my worst, I worry you’ll realize you deserve better.  At my best, I worry you won’t. (I’ve never been better.)Jake goes for a night flight after they rescue Ax and ends up at the Center.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah this is basically just fluff. But it's 100% canon compliant fluff. Which contains 0% spoilers for later books because I promised my roommate she would be allowed to read this one.
> 
> And before anyone questions me, THIS IS AS FLUFFY AS I GET OKAY. I only do fluff with a bonus helping of mild existential angst and/or physical harm.
> 
> EDIT: I forgot that this fandom's threshold for fluff is [the fucking kitten fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/815516), so I take it all back, no one is allowed to question me at all, this is pure cloud-like tooth-rotting cotton candy fluff by this fandom's standards.

It was dark when Jake left his house, just past midnight.  He was on his third straight hour of failing to sleep by the time he gave up and slipped out of bed, yanking off shirt and loose pajama pants in exchange for his morphing clothes.  Checking the door briefly to make sure it was locked—his parents were big believers in personal privacy, which had recently gone from a nice convenience to a desperately needed tactical advantage—he opened the window and started to morph.

The falcon was, as night flying morphs go, only barely better than a hang-glider.  Even the seagull might have been a better choice, he thought ruefully as he labored for altitude and circled over the neighborhood.  But the falcon’s mind was easier to manage, familiar and lacking the seagull’s pathological fixation on food.  Jake needed the ease of a known morph, needed the calm arrogance of a predator that knew it was the fastest thing on two wings. 

Jake didn’t have a plan, other than to fly for a while and see if it helped ease his mind.  He turned slow circles across the city, feeling the cool air rush across his wings and the burn of the muscles in his chest and back as he fought to regain every bit of altitude.  He couldn’t see the ground nearly as well as he could during the day, the falcon’s eyes ill-adapted for darkness, leaving him gliding more or less blind. 

Somehow he wasn’t surprised when he recognized the outline of the forest behind Cassie’s barn, and even less so when his wings spilled air without his permission.

Jake swooped through an upper window, open to let air circulate through the barn, and landed on the ground, among the dozing animals.  Demorphing caused less havoc than it usually did—most of the residents of the Center were asleep or, at the least, relaxed.  By the time he was fully human again, all he’d disturbed was a raccoon, watching him with sharp eyes in the dim light of the barn, and a trio of rabbits radiating confusion.  There was a fox who had paid attention and licked his chops at the sight of a small bird on the ground, but he’d lost interest as soon as Jake was bigger than he was.

Absent-minded, Jake wandered over to the cabinet holding most of the meds—the ones that wouldn’t hurt a wayward human—and started alphabetizing them.  Cassie’s father was perpetually misplacing them, and while Cassie _could_ navigate her father’s particular brand of chaos, she complained.  She liked things to be easy to find and quick to grab, so that she could focus on what she was actually doing.  Jake had alphabetized them for her before, killing time in the barn while she worked with the animals, but, to be fair, that was usually during daylight hours.

The door opening almost made him jump out of his skin, the perpetual low rustle of noise in the barn masking the approaching footsteps.  Instinct, both of the standard _someone’s behind me_ variety and the _I got shot at a whole lot over the last few days_ variety, made him whirl around, already braced to be yelled at. 

Cassie muffled a shriek and almost tripped backward over her own feet at the door, clapping one hand over her mouth.

“Cassie,” Jake said, letting out a shaky breath.  “Hi.”

“Jake, you scared me half to death!” she whispered, closing the door behind her and blinking in the dim light.  “What are you doing here at one in the morning?”

Jake scratched the back of his neck, apologetic, and hoped that the burn in his cheeks didn’t show.  “I’m, uh--”

“Are you…alphabetizing?” Cassie asked, cocking her head in bemusement.  She was rumpled, with circles marked out under her dark eyes, dressed in an overlarge sleep shirt and a pair of boots over her morphing clothes—far be it from Jake to judge.  Her hair was wet, water still clinging to the tiny corkscrew curls in places.  She looked beautiful, Jake thought distantly, with the vague feeling of having been awake and fighting for too many hours at a stretch.  There was a faint smile on her lips as Jake set down the pill bottle in his hand, hoping he didn’t look too sheepish.

“I—yeah, I was just.”  He waved a hand helplessly at the cabinet.  “Listen, I’m really sorry, I just.”  He paused and searched for the end of his sentence.  Couldn’t sleep?  Needed to see her?  Had to get out of his house, with Tom just on the other side of the wall?  Wanted to pretend he didn’t have world-ending problems on his hands?  “Kind of ended up here,” he finally said weakly.  “Besides, what are _you_ doing here at one in the morning?”

There’s a very similar silence to the one he’d left hanging as he tried to come up with an answer for her, and Cassie’s smile twists, rueful.

“Fair point.”

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Jake said, turning back to the cabinet and placing the last few pill bottles in line.  “I shouldn’t have come and bothered you.  You don’t--”  He closed his mouth, couldn’t quite force himself to finish the statement in case she realized he was right.  _You deserve better than to deal with me_ , Jake thought, desperately glad that thought-speech didn’t work in human form.  Maybe it made him a bad person that he hoped she would never figure it out.  He didn’t particularly care.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Cassie asked as Jake closed the door to the cabinet.

“Not really,” Jake admitted.  “I got an hour or so, right after I got home, but.”  He shrugged, turning back to her.  “You?  Nightmares?”

“Um, not so much as you’d think,” she said.  She grinned a little sheepishly herself.  “I, uh—I actually went to the Gardens.  To see the dolphins.”

Jake smiled, slow and small, as warm amusement bubbled up in his chest.  “And go for a swim?”

Cassie ran her hand over her hair, wry.  “Just for a little while.  What about you?”

“Just…worrying, I guess,” Jake said, raising a hand to rub at his forehead as his smile faded.  He didn’t remember doing that nearly so much when his biggest worries were making the basketball team and—coincidentally—his crush on his cousin’s best friend.

“We won a round,” Cassie said softly, coming closer to him and leaning her hip against the table beside the cabinet.  “Ax is alive.”

“ _Only_ Ax,” Jake pointed out.  “And we only managed to run.”  He shook his head, biting back the rush of fatalistic words clinging to the inside of his throat.  They needed a _win_ , not an escape—wars weren’t won by escapes.  “That’s not what I was thinking about, though.”

“No?”

He smiled again, this time grim and wry.  “Cassie, at this point, if everyone’s alive and in the same body they were yesterday, I’m counting it as a victory.”  She gave a small nod, something heavy and regretful in her eyes as she watched him, and Jake rubbed the heel of his hand at a spot of tense pain over one eye.  Raking his hand back through his hair, he said, “How the _hell_ are we going to hide an Andalite, indefinitely?  We can’t exactly have him live in our basement in human morph, he’s…”

“A disaster,” Cassie supplied helpfully.  A glint of humor touched her eyes and she added, “Aster.  Dis-aster.”

“You’re not funny,” Jake said through a helpless bubble of laughter, and Cassie smiled.  “Seriously, though, people hike your woods all the time,” he said, humor fading.  “What are we going to do if someone sees him?”  It was only one of the worst-case scenarios Jake had considered, when it came to Ax’s presence.  The Andalite was a skilled fighter and eager to fight, a valuable addition to the team and someone Jake could imagine being friends with, but he stood out, to say the least.  A wayward hiker, a Sharing expedition into the forest, a hunter—even something as mundane as a forest fire could ruin Ax’s cover.  At least it butted right up against national park land, more or less protected from loggers.  Jake didn’t even want to _think_ about that.

“We’ll have to deal with that when it comes,” Cassie said, shaking her head.  “I mean, Ax can morph, we’ll get him a bird of prey and whatever else is available that will let him blend in.  Besides, Tobias’ meadow is out in the woods, he seems to like Ax.  He wouldn’t let him get caught by anyone, if he could help it.”

“What do Andalites even eat?” Jake wondered aloud.  “Are we going to need to worry about smuggling him food?”

“ _How_ do Andalites even eat,” Cassie muttered, and Jake nodded to her.

“Or housing,” he continued.  “It’s been pretty dry this year, but if I was Ax, I wouldn’t exactly relish being out in a thunderstorm.  If we’re trying to hide him, we can’t exactly buy out the local camping store.  I mean--”

“Jake,” Cassie said sternly, reaching up to catch Jake’s face between her hands, wearing her best _I know you don’t like this cage or this medicine but you will put up with both because I say so_ expression.  It’s usually directed at her patients.

Jake stopped talking and closed his eyes.  “I’m sorry, Cassie,” he muttered.  “I’m just tired.  No filter.”

“It’s okay,” she said.  Her hands were cool against his face, steady, every callous and crease immediately scoring itself into his memory.  One of her thumbs swept over his cheekbone, leaving a trail of blazing heat behind its touch.

“You deserve better than listening to me stress about Ax,” Jake said, reaching up to catch her wrists and pull them down.  She resisted him, tendons going hard under his fingers, and he stopped—he was strong enough to move her hands by force, but…he didn’t want to.  He stood there, eyes closed and hands loose around her wrists, and her thumb repeated its sweep.

“Jake, you can come stress about Ax any time you want,” she said, firm.  She smiled again, small and gentle, as if taming something wild and frightened, and said, “You’re a good leader.  The fact that you’re human doesn’t change that.”

“I don’t know.”  The words were low, not quite under his breath.

Cassie hummed absently and asked, “Would you really have made the decision for me, about going after Ax?  If I’d asked you to?”

“Of course,” Jake said without thinking, opening his eyes in surprise at the question. 

“That’s why I know.”

He looked down at her, lost for a response.  Her eyes were incredible, this close—pure black, like spilled ink, and warm.  If he looked close enough, Jake thought he could probably see stars studding their darkness.  She was closer than he’d thought before, close enough that he could smell the oils she used in her hair, and the difference between their heights was starkly obvious at such close range—Jake could probably rest his chin on top of her head without standing on his toes.  He gave another gentle tug on her wrists, and this time she let him draw her hands down, away from his face. 

“Thank you,” he said quietly.  She didn’t answer, except to catch one of his hands before he could release her and give it a quick, fierce squeeze.

“You can stay, if you want,” Cassie offered, fingers still linked tightly with his.  “I was going to see if I slept any better in the hayloft.  Sometimes it helps.”

“Okay,” Jake said, because he was tired, and tired _of._   Tired of everything.  Tired of thinking, tired of planning, tired of worrying, tired of trying to be the version of himself who would leave Cassie alone instead of leaning on her for the night. 

The hayloft was a little cramped for someone of Jake’s height, and the barn was always lit, in case someone came to check on the animals at night.  There was a perpetual murmur of noise from the animals below, and the unfamiliar sweet smell of hay and alfalfa was distracting.  Even more distracting was Cassie’s hand on his arm and the line of her warmth curled into his side, her even breathing as she dozed off.  Jake expected to be up all night, between it all, but at least it was better than staring at his ceiling. 

He closed his eyes, resting his cheek on Cassie’s hair, and slid at once into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Incidentally, the next morning must be really interesting, and I expect it goes a little bit like a slapstick routine with a lot of scrambling to be in morph as birds before Cassie's dad shows up. Also, personal headcanons regarding Cassie having a very short afro and an affection for shirts way too big for her (like for example Jake's shirts) make a stealth appearance.
> 
> I have [a Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) and hopefully the link works this time.


End file.
